Pulmonary or lung cancer is currently a leading cause of cancer death. Early detection of cancer-related pulmonary nodules may provide the greatest chance to prevent deaths due to lung cancer. Non-invasive, high-resolution, thin-slice, multi-slice or multi-detector computed tomography (“CT”) scanners are capable of providing vast quantities of detailed imaging data on anatomical structures. Therefore, non-invasive early detection of pulmonary nodules from CT images holds great promise.
Unfortunately, although CT screening provides a means to detect small nodules in the early stages, large amounts of CT data expose the weaknesses of existing automatic nodule detection methods that typically have high false-positive ratios. The false-positive ratio is an important consideration for automatic nodule detection, and as such, it is desirable to reduce the false-positive ratio for automatic lung nodule detection.